In the Battle for NetHack, most signs suggest that vi is winning and Emacs is losing. Many players credit the yuhjklbn cursor system of Rogue and NetHack to the 'hjkl' cursor system in vi. Contrast the '^[BNPF]' system of Emacs, weak in scattering the relevant keys across the typical qwerty keyboard. This has vi given to NetHack, so what did Emacs give?

Emacs gave us nethack-el, a user interface that consists of an Emacs major mode, and a patch adding another window port to NetHack. How is this better than running Emacs and an editor separately, as vi users would do? One should instead ask what game should an Emacs user choose over NetHack. The nethack-el interface is as extensible as and uses buffers like everything else in Emacs. It is not suprising that some Emacs addicts are also NetHack addicts.